I was always focused on developing my skills. Since first days of my adventure with computers in the era of first Pentium and first Intel Inside stickers in pre-Windows95 times.
I have learned about system, drivers, computer startup order, config.sys, autoexec… that was nearly 3 decades ago. Now i have a small ARM64bit system in my pocket and … I have no idea how boot process on Android phones works. Even while I have a custom rom on this machine.
We came from times when if you wanted to run any program on computer you have to know how to work in CLI and have a basic knowledge about DOS to the times when you can install custom OS on your mobile and… do it in few clicks on a PC and few touches on mobile … and done. Easier than installing any modern programming IDE or even Office suite.
Our CI/CD pipelines can build software that we wrote, then can push it into testing environment, on success can push it onto production even with some DB migrations and transition prod env clearly without any outage for customers… We are in the times when writing software can be really a nice experience.
AND we are fucking it.
We – developers – are reading blogposts about this magic. We are watching YT videos with great examples of this idea. We are sometimes going to conferences… and listening about this beautiful green Eden of great pipelines.
And then we are back on project and doing most work manually because we hear from each side that “we don’t have time/money/knowledge/client acceptance/whatever” to do it…
My favourite explanation is “we don’t have time, we will not give you two days to do it, becuse we have a lot of features to code”… and meanwhile we have time to spend on each developer while we are waiting for builds, while uploading them to test env, waiting for tests to manual execute and then to push it to production. Sometimes with “funny” errors like development config on prod or vice versa…
Because two days for build proper CICD pipeline has too big cost. This stupid 16 work hours we lost each week in the team. But whatever… company doesn’t need happy developers working on features, company need manual processing power of devs.